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WATER: New Technologies Do Not Suffice

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Mar 20 2006 (IPS) - By replacing piston pumps with simple rope pumps, which are inexpensive and easy to install, rural water supply coverage in Nicaragua has risen 23 percent over the past decade, three times faster than in neighbouring countries.

This was one of the examples cited at the Mar. 16-22 Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico, where 320 companies from 27 countries are displaying their products and services, many of which have already been applied in the world’s poorest areas – although not always with success.

“There are cheap and sustainable technologies to tackle water and sanitation problems, but they don’t work in every case, because the local context and people have not been taken into account,” Fernando Chanduvi, a Peruvian former official with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told IPS.

At the Forum, Chanduvi, who works for the Switzerland-based Water for the Third World, was promoting the use of pedal-powered water pumps that cost 100 dollars.

>From his stand in the hallways of the convention centre where the Water Forum is taking place, Chanduvi explained to hundreds of visitors how the pump works, and said that some 500,000 of these pumps have already been installed in poor parts of Bangladesh.

Alice Bouman, president of the Netherlands-based Women for Water Partnership, told IPS that the advances in water-and sanitation-related technologies are incredible, but warned that they would be useless “if they are not implemented as part of plans that have been defined by the communities themselves.”

Four out of 10 people worldwide have no access to a latrine, two out of 10 lack access to clean drinking water, only half of the world’s population have piped water in their homes, and between 30 and 40 percent of piped water is lost to leakages.

Eighty percent of illnesses and deaths in the developing world are attributed to water-borne diseases like cholera, typhoid, guinea worm, diarrhea and polio, and over one million people a year die of malaria alone, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes, which lay their eggs in stagnant water.

Much could be done towards eradicating such problems with existing technologies. But they are not always available, and when they are, they are not always useful.

The rope pumps that have worked so well in Nicaragua, extracting water in wells up to 35 metres deep, have not had the same success in countries in Africa, states a report by the non-governmental Netherlands Water Partnership (NWP), which promotes the use of that technology.

According to the NWP, one of the hurdles to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for water coverage and poverty reduction lies in the erroneous choice of technologies, which can be too costly or complex for local users.

One of the MDGs, agreed by the United Nations in 2000, is to halve the proportion of people in the world without access to water by 2015.

Chanduvi, a retired FAO official who is now promoting a pump similar to the one used in Nicaragua, but pedal-driven, said it is not only a question of the technology that is used. “If the advances made, whatever they might be, are not adapted to the reality of each community, and people do not participate, failure is guaranteed,” he argued.

Chanduvi’s stand has been one of the most heavily visited during the Forum. Small farmers and government delegates periodically milled around to watch the demonstration of how the pedal-powered pump works.

At another popular stand, the California-based Waterless company exhibited its “no-flush” urinal, which saves more than 100,000 litres of water – what a normal urinal uses in a year.

Christoph Kubitza, the company’s manager of international sales, explained that when the urine falls into the “Ecotrap” drain insert, it passes through a floating layer of biodegradable liquid, which forms a barrier, and the urine drains down the central tube, to the conventional drain line, without the need of water.

He said that in the United States, it took the company seven years to convince people that the urinals are environmentally-friendly and hygienic, and that they really do not need water. “Now we are doing the same in other parts of the world,” he said.

Other products on display at the Fourth World Water Forum – which is being attended by 13,000 representatives of governments, business and the United Nations – were solar water purifiers and latrines that can be installed in two hours. Also exhibited were novel developments like digital systems to detect leaks and other problems in water pipes, special highly-resistant pipes, and automatic water purifiers.